fitting foretaste of trans-stygian torment! The grand inquisitor
followed the victim and the familiars into this awful place: and, on a
signal being given by that high functionary, Isaachar was stripped of
all his upper clothing, and stretched on the accursed rack. Then
commenced the torture--the agonizing torture by means of that infernal
instrument, a torture which dislocated the limbs, appeared to tear the
members asunder, and produced sensations as if all the nerves of the
body were suddenly being drawn out through the brain.

"Dost thou confess? and wilt thou embrace the Christian faith?" demanded
the grand inquisitor from time to time.

"I have nothing to confess--I will not renounce the creed of my
forefathers!" answered Isaachar in a tone of bitter agony, as he writhed
upon the rack, while every fresh shock and jerk of the infernal engine
seemed as if it would tear the very life out of him. But the old man
remained firm in the declaration of his innocence of the dreadful crime
imputed to him: stanch also to his creed did he remain; and having
endured the full extent of that special mode of torture, he was borne
back to his dungeon, cruelly injured, with dislocated limbs, blood
streaming from his mouth and nostrils, and these terrible words of the
grand inquisitor ringing in his ears--"Obstinate and impenitent one,
Satan claims thee as his own; therefore art thou condemned to death by
fire at the approaching _auto de-fe_!"

Half an hour afterward another human being lay stretched upon that
accursed rack, and agonizing--oh! most agonizing were the female shrieks
and rending screams which emanated from the lips of the tortured victim,
but which reached not beyond the solid masonry of those walls and the
massive iron-plated door. The white and polished arms were stretched out
in a position fearfully painful beyond the victim's head, and the wrists
were fastened to a steel bar by means of a thin cord, which cut through
flesh, muscle and nerve to the very bone! The ankles were attached in a
similar manner to a bar at the lower end of the rack, and thus from the
female's hands and feet thick clots of gore fell on the stone pavement.
But even the blood flowed not so fast from her lacerated limbs as
streamed the big drops of agony from her distorted countenance--that
countenance erst so beautiful, and so well beloved by thee, Manuel
d'Orsini! For, oh! upon that rack lay stretched the fair and half-naked
form of Giuli